Digital devices such as microcontrollers, consumer electronic devices, digital signal processors, intelligent switches, or components of such devices often comprise some form of real time monitoring mechanism for enabling a developer to analyze whether the device is operating correctly before the device is released on the market. Such monitoring mechanisms may notably comprise features such as hardware performance counters and one or more hardware trace buffers. Reading out the performance counters or retrieving a trace from a trace buffer usually involves connecting the device to a local host device such as a general purpose computer.
Testing a complex application on a digital device can take many days and may require multiple resources. For instance, in order to test an application which uses a Zigbee communication protocol, two targets, a coordinator, and a node may have to be monitored during the testing phase. Sophisticated hardware and software has, therefore, been developed in recent years in an attempt to automate the testing process where possible.